The Highwire with Del Bigtree - AVIK ROY: THE GREATEST THREAT TO OUR LIBERTY

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

Freedom Files presents the co-founder of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, Avik Roy, chronicles his evidence-based fight to open schools during the lockdowns, his behind-the-scenes meeting with a top official in the Biden administration who shamed his efforts, and the grave threat of central bank digital currencies.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Mr. Avicroy, thank you so much for joining us today. One of the things I want to talk to you about, your response, I know you are part of Brarington Declaration in October 2020, said, hey, don't lock down these schools, don't do these lockdown restrictions, but how are you a part of trying to open these schools back up in the economy? The American Enterprise Institute, where I have a lot of friends, they put out a white paper,

authored by a number of their leading healthcare experts, supporting the lockdown strategy. and saying, we're going to have to keep the economy locked down until there's a vaccine. Prior to COVID, the land speed record for developing a new vaccine was five years. Yes. So you're not going to keep the entire society shut down for five. You can't keep society shut down for one year. Right.

And so we just started cranked in action and said, look, we have to build the scientific case for Congress, for the White House, for governors, for state legislatures, for school districts. Yeah. where we say instead of thinking about how to keep everyone shut down, let's use all the available data we have to say what can safely reopen. To give an example, you know, you have a automated car wash that literally no humans are washing your car. We've all been to this car wash, you drive through it,

it's all mechanical, you go out, your car is clean, right? Car washes were not essential businesses, so they were shut down. This made no sense. Okay, yes, it may not be as essential as a hospital, or a grocery store to your everyday life. But it can operate safely. Why was the model, I'm going to decide what's essential and then just shut these various things down,

versus what can we operate safely? What do we know we can operate? So after we wrote, we went with a 6,000-word paper, we had an amazing group of co-authors on it. This came out in March of April 20, a merger of 2020, I think. It may have been early April. I can't remember somewhere around that.

The Wall Street Journal contacted me and said, hey, we love your white paper. Can you come up, can you write a 2400 word ad? for the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. We'll put it on the cover. I'm like, of course. So we did that, got a lot of play, and we started getting these questions

from all over the country, from people in positions of authorities. I love your paper. How can we do this? How can we reopen the schools? Did you get pushback? What was the most pushback you received, whether behind the scenes or front facing,

to what you were trying to do? Because you were going against a narrative, let's be clear. Listen, I mean, we got enormous push I remember when we when we launched our school reopening paper, I was invited to present the data to a bunch of public health experts. And I'll never forget a guy who was then an academic public health guy said to me after I presented all the data showing that in every country that had reopened schools, unlike the U.S., there had been no increase in COVID transmission. None. France, Germany, South Korea, Finland, take your pick. Every country where this had been studied, there had been no increase in transmission.

So you could safely reopen schools. Didn't matter whether you kept the kid six feet apart or zero feet apart. It didn't matter whether a more Warmaster didn't. In every case, this transmission levels did not increase. So we went through this data comprehensively. Present all this data, and then this guy says, Ovik, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You're going to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in this country. And it's just appalling what you've done here today.

Did this person refute it with data? No, he just kind of, he was kind of a hot take. We'd get along reasonably well outside of this. And he was just going off. And I'm just like, I looked at him kind of astonished. I was just so stunned that he would say something so insane. Yeah. So that's interesting.

We sat down with Dr. Scott Atlas a couple weeks ago. And his experience inside the White House as a coronavirus advisor was very similar because he would come and say, Dr. Birx, Dr. Fauci, these people were not coming to table with data. They were coming to the table with almost emotional appeals. And so it's interesting hearing you saying similar things about your experience. Now, I want to shift gears really quick here. Central Bank Digital Currencies. Do you think the U.S. government would adopt a decentralized Bitcoin currency

while they're working on these Central Bank digital currencies? Well, first of all, let's explain what these things are. So there's Bitcoin, which is the original digital decentralized currency, which nobody controls. You can own some Bitcoin, but, No one can take it away from you, and no one can tell you what to do with it. A central bank digital currency is basically the exact opposite of Bitcoin. They're basically totalitarian currencies where if I'm the People's Bank of China,

and you live in China, and we're using a central bank digital currency to do business, then if I've decided you're a bad guy and I want to wipe out your bank account, I can do that with the flick of a wrist or the click of a button. The Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve will have a window and literally everything you buy, every financial transaction you ever make and can censor those transactions. We do not need a central bank digital currency. This is the single greatest threat to our liberties that is being advanced by the federal government today, and we've got to stop it.

I appreciate you giving that breakdown. It's very important. Avikroy, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. All right.